Photo Backup Strategy While Travelling

It’s been a while since my last post and pod­cast and I hope to make up for it– shortly.

I’m lucky enough to be trav­el­ling on a pho­tog­ra­phy hol­i­day right now (I’m in Prague, CZ) and because this is a photo hol­i­day, the pho­tographs I am tak­ing are pre­cious and irre­place­able. I’d like to think that most seri­ous pho­tog­ra­phers feel the same way and so I thought I’d share my photo backup strat­egy while trav­el­ling.

Bub­bles, Kids and the Tyn Church — Prague CZ

Let me say up front that I am not upload­ing my RAW files to ‘the cloud’ — because upload­ing huge files (30 megs per file in my case) only works well when you have a super fast con­nec­tion and a fast com­puter. Even then, it can take a looooong time to upload 50–100 files. So far I have been to Lon­don, Paris, Ams­ter­dam and Prague. The wifi con­nec­tions, on aver­age, have been spotty every­where I have been. (I’ve been using qual­ity airbnb’s but so far my wifi has never ever been flaw­less). There­fore, upload­ing is out of the ques­tion and I’m basi­cally going old school.

Here’s my sim­ple method; The mem­ory cards that hold the files (I brought 4 cards of 32 GB each) NEVER leave my sight. They are with me 100% of the time and eas­ily fit into my pocket at all times when not inside my cam­era at my side. When my cam­era is not by my side, the cards are removed and go in my pocket.

In addi­tion, I backup those files to a small portable West­ern Dig­i­tal 2GB drive that I pur­chased for 79 dol­lars before I left. It’s around the size of a pack of 25 cig­a­rettes. Then I usu­ally hide that drive some­where in the room I’m stay­ing. This method is quite fast and effi­cient and it makes me feel safe. There would have to be 2 cat­a­stro­phes for me to lose my data.

One last thing to note — You need a decent lap­top com­puter to do this kind of thing. Tablets and Ipads are pure JUNK for photo editing.

If any­one has addi­tional sug­ges­tions to share — I’d love to hear them. Thanks and many more pics to fol­low when I return.